A non-invasive blood test successfully detected early-stage cancer and identified tumour location in asymptomatic individuals in Vietnam according to a new study.

The research will be presented at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Breakthrough Meeting, taking place August 3-5 in Yokohama, Japan.

According to the study authors, up to 80% of cancer patients in Vietnam, where a nationwide cancer screening program is not currently available, are diagnosed at later stages (III or IV), leading to a low 5-year survival rate.

Earlier detection can improve the chance of survival and clinical outcomes for patients with cancer.

“Common screening methods are often invasive, inaccessible, and involve separate procedures to screen individual cancer types. Affordable, accessible, non-invasive multi-cancer screening tests are needed for early detection, especially in a lower-middle income country like Vietnam. Our study provides clinical evidence for the applicability of the SPOT-MAS ctDNA-based assay as a complementary method in early cancer detection,” said senior study author Le Son Tran, PhD, Gene Solutions, Medical Genetics Institute, Vietnam.

The Screening for the Presence Of Tumour by Methylation And Size (SPOT-MAS) test is a liquid biopsy-based assay that was developed to test the five most common cancer types in Vietnam — liver, breast colorectal, gastric, and lung cancers.

SPOT-MAS captures multiple signals of cancer from circulating-tumour DNA (ctDNA) in the blood.

The study, named K-DETEK, recruited 10,000 asymptomatic participants across 14 sites in Vietnam.

This interim analysis included 2,795 participants with moderate to high cancer risk who had neither clinical suspicion of cancer nor a confirmed history of cancer.

The key findings were: 

• SPOT-MAS detected cancer in asymptomatic participants with a positive predictive value of 60% — meaning that for every 100 people that test positive, 60 have cancer.
• The test was able to predict the location of a tumour with 83.3% accuracy, allowing clinicians to fast-track the follow-up diagnostic and guide any necessary treatment.

The authors are conducting a study aiming to refine the SPOT-MAS assay to expand its cancer-type coverage to include rarer cancers, such as ovarian and pancreatic cancers, that would currently be missed by the test.

Article: Blood test demonstrates potential utility for early cancer detection, according to new study in Vietnam

Source: American Society of Clinical Oncology